Social and behavioral scientists

Richard Alba

Richard Alba (1942–2025) was an American sociologist and demographer at the CUNY Graduate Center who revived assimilation theory, argued immigrant descendants integrate into mainstream society, and questioned the majority-minority future.

Richard B. Freeman

Richard B. Freeman is an American labor economist, Herbert Ascherman Professor of Economics at Harvard, known for research on unions and the science and engineering workforce.

Richard Baldwin

Richard Baldwin is an American economist, professor of international economics at IMD Business School in Lausanne, known for his "second unbundling" framework explaining modern globalization.

Richard Borshay Lee

Richard Borshay Lee is a Canadian anthropologist and University Professor Emeritus at the University of Toronto, known for fieldwork among the Ju/'hoansi-!Kung San of Botswana and Namibia.

Richard C. Atkinson

Richard C. Atkinson is an American experimental psychologist known for mathematical models of memory and for serving as president of the University of California from 1995 to 2003.

Richard Cloward

Richard Cloward (1926–2001) was an American sociologist and social-work educator at Columbia University who, with his wife Frances Fox Piven, proposed the welfare-rights strategy known as the Cloward–Piven strategy.

Richard D. Wolff

Richard D. Wolff (born 1942, Youngstown, Ohio) is an American Marxian economist, UMass Amherst professor emeritus, Democracy at Work co-founder, and Economic Update host known for his surplus-labor class theory with Stephen Resnick and advocacy of worker self-directed enterprises.

Richard Fenno

Richard Fenno (1926–2020) was an American political scientist at the University of Rochester who studied Congress closely and identified Fenno's Paradox, that voters distrust Congress but reelect their own representatives.

Richard Gregory

Richard Langton Gregory (1923–2010) was a British psychologist who studied visual perception, argued that perceptions are hypotheses, wrote Eye and Brain, and founded the journal Perception.

Richard H. Thaler

Richard H. Thaler is an American behavioral economist at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, awarded the 2017 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his work in behavioral economics.

Sep 20, 2026

Richard J. Davidson

Richard J. Davidson, born 1951, is an American neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison who studies the brain bases of emotion and, since meeting the Dalai Lama in 1992, meditation.

Richard J. Evans

Sir Richard J. Evans (born 1947) is a British historian of modern Germany, Regius Professor of History at Cambridge, author of the Third Reich trilogy, and principal expert witness in the 2000 Irving v. Penguin libel trial.

Richard J. Haier

Richard J. Haier is an American psychologist at UC Irvine known for the parieto-frontal integration theory (P-FIT) of intelligence and his 1988 PET brain-imaging studies.

Richard L. Church

Richard L. Church is an American geographer and location scientist, Distinguished Professor Emeritus at UC Santa Barbara, elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2022.

Richard Lynn

Richard Lynn (1930–2023), British psychologist and University of Ulster professor emeritus, compiled the national IQ database with Tatu Vanhanen, led the Pioneer Fund, and saw his race-and-IQ work discredited and targeted for retraction.

Richard McKelvey

Richard McKelvey (1944–2002) was an American political scientist and social choice theorist at Caltech, best known for his chaos theorems on majority-rule cycling and agenda control.

Richard Musgrave (economist)

Richard Musgrave (1910–2007) was a German-born American economist widely regarded as the founder of modern public finance, known for his three-branch framework of allocation, distribution, and stabilization.

Richard R. Nelson

Richard R. Nelson (1930–2025) was an American economist who co-founded modern evolutionary economics; with Sidney Winter he wrote the 1982 book An Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change.

Richard Rogerson

Richard Rogerson is an American macroeconomist and labor economist at Princeton University, known for the home production model of business cycles and search-theoretic labor market research.

Richard Roll

Richard Roll, also known as Richard W. Roll, is an American finance economist, Linde Institute Professor at Caltech, known for Roll's Critique and a 1984 bid-ask spread measure.

Richard S.j. Tol

Richard S.J. Tol is a Dutch-trained economist at the University of Sussex known for the FUND integrated assessment model and his meta-analyses of the social cost of carbon.

Richard Schmalensee

Richard Schmalensee is an American economist, MIT Sloan professor and dean emeritus, a pioneer of multisided platform economics, and an expert witness in U.S. v. Microsoft.

Richard Solomon (psychologist)

Richard Solomon was an American experimental psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1968, best known for opponent-process theory.

Richard T. Ely

Richard T. Ely, full name Richard Theodore Ely, was an American economist who founded the American Economic Association in 1885 and built Wisconsin's graduate social science program.

Richard Tremblay

Richard Tremblay is a Canadian developmental psychologist, professor emeritus at Université de Montréal, whose research showed that physical aggression appears in infancy and declines as children learn to control it.

Richard Zeckhauser

Richard Zeckhauser is an American economist, the Frank P. Ramsey Professor at Harvard Kennedy School since 1972, known for decision theory and pioneering policy analysis.

Rima Azar

Rima Azar is a Lebanese-born Canadian health psychologist at Mount Allison University, known for her prenatal stress research and her 2021 suspension over pseudonymous blog posts.

Robb Willer

Robb Willer is an American sociologist at Stanford University who studies what unites and divides people, known for moral reframing research and the Strengthening Democracy Challenge.

Robert A. Jacobs

Robert A. Jacobs is a cognitive scientist and professor at the University of Rochester, co-developer of the 1991 mixtures-of-experts neural network architecture with Jordan, Nowlan, and Hinton.